The Magus - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  He shook his hand to the south. "To the mainland. For the summer." He explained that a minority of the island fishermen were seminomadic. In winter they fished in the protected waters off Phraxos; but in summer, taking their families with them, they wandered round the Peloponnesus, even as far as Crete, in search of better fishing. He returned to the cottages. He pointed down and then made drinking gestures.

  "The cisterns are bad. No good water in summer."

  "Really — no good water?"

  "No."

  "What a shame."

  "It is his fault. He of Bourani. He could make better cisterns. But he is too mean."

  "He owns the cottages then?"

  "Vevaios." Of course. "On that side of the island, all is his."

  "All the land?"

  He ticked off his stubby fingers: Korbi, Stremi, Bourani, Moutsa, Pigadi, Zastena . . . all names of bays and caps around Bourani; and apparently this was another complaint against Conchis. Various Athenians, "rich people," would have liked to build villas over there. But Conchis refused to sell one meter; deprived the island of badly needed wealth. A donkey loaded with wood tripped down the quay towards us; rubbing its legs together, picking its fastidious way like a model. This news proved Demetriades's complicity. It must have been common gossip.

  "I suppose you see his guests in the village?"

  He raised his head, negatively, uninterestedly; it was nothing to him whether there were guests or not. I persisted. Did he know if there were foreigners staying over there?

  But he shrugged. "Isos." Perhaps. He did not know.

  Then I had a piece of luck. A little old man appeared from a side alley and came behind Georgiou's back; a battered old seaman's cap, a blue canvas suit so faded with washing that it was almost white in the sunlight. Georgiou threw him a glance as he passed our tabib, then called. "Eh, Barba Dimitraki! Ela." Come. Come and speak with the English professor.

  The old man stopped. He must have been about eighty; very shaky, unshaven, but not totally senile. Georgiou turned to me.

  "Before the war. He was the same as Hermes. He took the mail to Bourani."

  I pressed the old man to take a seat, ordered more ouzo and another mezé.

  "You know Bourani well?"

  He waved his old hand; he meant, very well, more than he could express. He said something I didn't understand. Georgiou, who had some linguistic resourcefulness, piled our cigarette boxes and matches together like bricks. Building.

  "I understand. In 1929?"

  The old man nodded.

  "Did Mr. Conchis have many guests before the war?"

  "Many many guests." This surprised Georgiou; he even repeated my question, and got the same answer.

  "Foreigners?"

  "Many foreigners. Frenchmen, Englishmen, all."

  "What about the English masters at the school? Did they go there?"

  "Ne, ne. Oloi." Yes, all of them.

  "You can't remember their names?" He smiled at the ridiculousness of the question. He couldn't even remember what they looked like. Except one who was very tall.

  "Did you meet them in the village?"

  "Sometimes. Sometimes."

  "What did they do at Bourani, before the war?"

  "They were foreigners."

  Georgiou was impatient at this exhibition of village logic. "Ne, Barba. Xenoi. Ma ti ekanon?"

  "Music. Singing. Dancing." Once again Georgiou didn't believe him; he winked at me, as if to say, the old man is soft in the head. But I knew he wasn't; and that Georgiou had not come to the island till 1946.

  "What kind of singing and dancing?"

  He didn't know; his rheumy eyes seemed to search for the past, and lose it. But he said, "And other things. They acted in plays." Georgiou laughed out loud, but the old man shrugged and said indifferently, "It is true."

  Georgiou leant forward with a grin. "And what were you, Barba Dimitraki? Karayozis?"

  He was talking about the Greek shadowplay Punch.

  I made the old man see I believed him. "What kind of plays?"

  But his face said he didn't know. "There was a theatre in the garden."

  "Where in the garden?"

  "Behind the house. With curtains. A real theatre."

  "You know Maria?"

  But it seemed that before the war it had been another housekeeper, called Soula, now dead.

  "When were you last there?"

  "Many years. Before the war."

  "Do you still like Mr. Conchis?"

  The old man nodded, but it was a brief, qualified nod. Georgiou chipped in.

  "His eldest son was killed in the execution."

  "Ah. I am very sorry. Very sorry."

  The old man shrugged; kismet. He said, "He is not a bad man."

  "Did he work with the Germans in the Occupation?"

  The old man raised his head, a firm no. Georgiou made a hawk of violent disagreement. They began to argue, talking so fast that I couldn't follow them. But I heard the old man say, "I was here. You were not here."

  Georgiou turned to me and whispered, "He has given the old man a house. And money every year. The old man cannot say what he really thinks."

  "Does he do that for the other relatives?"

  "Bah. One or two. The old ones. Why not. He has millions." He made the corruption gesture, meaning conscience money.

  Suddenly the old man said to me, "Mia phora . . . once there was a big pane yiri with many lights and music and fireworks. Many fireworks and many guests."

  I had an absurd vision of a garden party; hundreds of elegant women, and men in morning dress.

  "When was that?"

  "Three, five years before the war."

  "Why was this celebration?"

  But he didn't know.

  "Were you there?"

  "I was with my son. We were fishing. We saw it up in Bourani. Many lights, many voices. Kai ta pyrotechnimata." And the fireworks.

  Georgiou said, "Yah. You were drunk, Barba."

  "No. I was not drunk."

  Try as I did, I could get nothing more out of the old man. I was on lunch-and-afternoon duty; so in the end I shook them both by the hand, paid the small bill, tipped Georgiou heavily, and walked back to the school.

  One thing was clear. There had been Leverrier, Mitford and myself; but then others whose names I did not yet know back in the thirties; a long line. It gave me the courage to face whatever new was being prepared in that now uncurtained theatre over on the far side.

  * * *

  I returned to the village that evening, and climbed up the narrow cobbled streets that led to the back of the village; past warrens of whitewashed walls, peasant interiors, tiny squares shaded by almond trees. Great magenta sprays of bougainvillea flamed in the sun or glowed in the pale evening shadows. It was a sort of kasbah area of the village, a very pretty kasbah, with its cross glimpses of the plunibago-blue six-o'clock sea below, and the gold-green pinecovered hills above. People sitting outside their cottages greeted me, and I collected the inevitable small Pied Piper chain of children, who subsided into giggles if I looked at them and waved them away. When I came to the church I went in. I wanted to justify my presence in the quarter. It was densely gloomy, with a miasma of incense over everything; a row of ikons, somber silhouettes set in smoky gold, stared down at me, as if they knew what an alien I was in their cryptlike Byzantine world.

  After five minutes I came out. The children had mercifully disappeared, and I could take the alley to the right of the church. On one side there were the round cylinders of the church apses, on the other a wall eight or nine feet high. The alley turned and the wall continued. But halfway along it there was an arched gateway: a keystone with the date 1823 Ofl it, and above that a place where there had once been a coat of arms. I guessed that the house inside had been built by one of the pirate "admirals" of the War of Independence. There was a narrow door let into the right hand of the two gate doors, with a slit for letters. Above it, painted white on black on an old
bit of sheet metal, was the name Hermes Ambelas. To the left the ground fell away behind the church. There was no way of looking over the wall from that side. I went to the small door and pushed it gently to see if it gave. But it was locked. The islanders were notoriously honest, thieves unknown; and I could not remember having seen an outer gate locked like that anywhere else on Phraxos.

  I went on. The rocky lane dipped abruptly down between two cottages. The roof of the one on the right was below the wall of the house. At the bottom a cross alley took me back and around to the other side. There the ground fell away even more precipitously and I found myself looking up ten feet of vertical rock even before the wall foundation started. The house and its garden walls on this side continued the rockface, and I could see that in fact it was not a very big house, though still by village standards much too grandiose for a donkey driver.

  Two ground-floor windows, three upstairs, all shuttered. They were still in the last sunlight and must have given a fine view west over the village and the straits to the Argolian mainland. Was it a view Julie knew well? I felt like Blondel beneath Richard Coeur de Lion's window, but not even able to pass messages by song. Down in a small square below I could see two or three women interestedly watching me. I waved, strolled on, as if my look upwards had been idle curiosity. I came to yet another cross alley, and climbed up it to my starting point outside Agios Elias. The house was impregnable to passing eyes.

  Later, down in front of the Hotel Philadelphia, I looked back. I could see over all the intervening roofs the church and the house to the right of it, the five windows staring out. They seemed defiant, but blind.

  51

  Monday was a day of academic chores, catching up on the Sisyphean piles of marking that seemed always to roll down on my desk; finalizing — miserable word for a miserable prospect — the end-of-term examination papers; and trying all the time not to think about Julie. I knew it was useless asking emetriades to help me find out the names of the English masters at the school before the war. If he knew them he wouldn't tell them; and very probably he genuinely did not know them. I went to the school bursar, but this time he could not help me; all the bursary records had gone with the wind of 1940. On Tuesday I tried the master who ran the school library. He went at once to a shelf and pulled down a bound volume of Founder's Day programs — one for each year before the war. These programs were lavishly got up to impress visiting parents and in the back contained class lists — as well as a list of "professors." In ten minutes I had the names of the six who had taught between 1930 and 1939. But I was still stuck for

  all their addresses.

  The week ground slowly past. Each lunchtime I watched the village postman come in with letters and give them to the duty prefect, who then made a slow, slow tour of the tables. None came for me. I expected no mercy from Conchis; but I found it hard to forgive Julie. The first and most obvious possibility was that she had taken her sister's advice and flown back to England; in which case I couldn't believe she would not have written at once — at least to tell me. The second was that she had had to accept the cancellation of the weekend; but she could still have written to console me, to explain why. The third was that she was being held prisoner, or at any rate incommunicado to the extent that she could not post a letter to me. I couldn't really believe that, though I had angry moments when I thought of going to the police, or of hiring a caϊque and going to Nauplia myself.

  The days dragged on, redeemed only by one little piece of information that fell into my hands by chance. Looking through the books in the English bay in the library for a suitable "unseen" for the exams, I took down a Conrad. There was a name on the flyleaf: D. P. R. Nevinson. I knew he had been at the school before the war. Underneath was written Balliol College, 1930. I started looking through the other books. Nevinson had left a good number; but there was no other address besides Balliol. The name W. A. Hughes, another prewar master's, appeared on two poetry volume flyleafs, without address.

  I left lunch early on the Thursday, asking a boy to bring me any letters that might be distributed later. I had come not to expect any. But about ten minutes afterwards, when I was already in pajamas for the siesta, the boy knocked on my door. Two letters. One from London, a typewritten address, some educational publisher's catalogue. But the other . . .

  A Greek stamp. Indecipherable postmark. Neat italic handwriting. In English.

  Siphnos, Monday

  MY DEAR SWEET NICHOLAS,

  I know you must be angry with me for not having written, but the answer is very simple. We've been at sea (in all ways) and today is our first in sight of a postbox. I must be quick, because the boat that takes the mail sails in half an hour. I am writing in a cafe' by the harbor and June is keeping watch.

  We left Nauplia in the yacht on Thursday, we thought for a day or two's cruise. I don't know where to begin — well, first of all, June has refused to go on. He began to tell us the "script" on Friday evening. It involved my having a ridiculous quarrel with you. Then June trying to make it up — and trying to make love to you at the same time. Of course we demanded to know why — why everything, in the end. I can't tell you all we said — except that when it had all been said, neither June nor myself was satisfied. He went back to this business of mystification, and some incomprehensible talk about time. Time with a capital T. I don't think we were meant to understand. He was cunning, really, because he said that the more we demanded to know, the more impossible it was to go on.

  June took all the initiative. She told him about you and me. He pretended to be amazed, but we didn't believe his amazement (probably weren't meant to). (I must hurry.) In the end he became very understanding, but once again too understanding. You know what I mean. Greeks, and fearing gifts.

  When we went to bed we thought we were heading back for Nauplia — and then on to the island on Saturday. Instead when we got up we were out of sight of land — and we've stayed out of sight — reach, anyway — of land till now. All Maurice would say was that he had to revise all his plans. I think he may have been trying to soften us — show us how hurt he was, and remind us (me, sweet Nicholas) of what we were missing. But we stood firm.

  What has been arranged is this: he has begged me to play my part for one more week. He says he wants to tell you the last chapter of his life and to play what he calls the disintoxication" scene. He says you will now be expecting the last chapter (?). Whatever seems to be happening (he's told us, so I tell you) on Saturday and Sunday, at the end no bell will ring. I shan't have to go away . . . unless you want me to. Perhaps you do now.

  It will be only one or two more days when you get this. He may play some last Maurician trick, so please pretend, remember that you haven't read this, you know nothing — you must act a little now! — please. For my sake.

  Nicholas.

  June says I must finish.

  I so want to see you. If you only knew how often I think of you. That night.

  JULIE

  P.S. There's to be a present for you. A sort of surprise. At the very end. J.

  I read the letter twice, three times.

  I lay on the bed and thought of her coming to me; her nakedness; lying together, nothing other between us. I felt completely buoyant again, able to cope; as long as she was still in Greece, to be waiting for me at Bourani . . .

  I was woken at four by the bell that a prefect always came across and rang with vindictive violence in the wide stone corridor outside our rooms. There was the usual chorus of angry shouts from my colleagues. I lay on my elbow and read Lily's letter twice more. Then I remembered the other one I had thrown on my desk and went yawning to open that.

  * * *

  Inside was a typewritten note and another, airmail, envelope slit open, but I hardly looked at them because two newspaper cuttings were pinned on to the top of the note. I had to read them first.

  The first words.

  The first words.

  The whole thing had happened to me before, the same sen
sations, the same feeling that it could not be true and was true, of vertiginous shock and superficial calm. Coming out of the Randolph in Oxford with two or three other people, walking up to Carfax, a man under the tower selling the Evening News. Standing there, a silly girl saying "Look at Nicholas, he's pretending he can read." And I looked up with the death of parents in my face and said "My mother and father." As if I had just for the first time discovered that such people existed.

  The top cutting was from some local newspaper, from the bottom of a column. It said:

  AIR HOSTESS SUICIDE

  Australian air hostess Alison Kelly, 24, was found yesterday lying on her bed in the Russell Square flat they both share by her friend Ann Taylor, also Australian, when she returned from a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon. She was rushed to the Middlesex Hospital but found to be dead on admission. Miss Taylor was treated for shock. Inquest next week.

  The second cutting said:

  UNHAPPY IN LOVE SO KILLS HERSELF

  PC Henry Davis told the deputy Holborn coroner on Tuesday how on the evening of Sunday, June z9th, he found a young woman lying on her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets by her side. He had been called by the dead girl's flat-mate, Australian physiotherapist Ann Taylor, who found the deceased, Alison Kelly, air hostess, aged 24, on her return from a weekend at Stratford-on-Avon.

  A verdict of suicide was recorded.

  Miss Taylor said that although her friend had been subject to fits of depression and said she could not sleep properly she had had no reason to suppose the deceased was in a suicidal frame of mind. In answer to questions, Miss Taylor said, "My friend was recently depressed because of an unhappy love affaire, but I thought she had got over it."

  Dr. Behrens, the deceased's doctor, told the coroner that Miss Kelly had led her to believe that it was her work which gave her insomnia. Asked by the coroner whether she normally prescribed such large quantities of tablets, Dr. Behrens replied that she took into account the difficulty the deceased might have in getting to a chemist frequently. She had no reason to suspect suicide.